Today In History July 24

Today’s Highlight in History: On July 24, 1915, the SS Eastland, a passenger ship carrying more than 2,500 people, rolled onto its side while docked at the Clark Street Bridge on the Chicago River; an estimated 844 people died in the disaster.

On this date

1862: Martin Van Buren, the eighth president of the United States, and the first to have been born a U.S. citizen, died at age 79 in Kinderhook, New York, the town where he was born in 1782.

1866: Tennessee became the first state to be readmitted to the Union after the Civil War.

1937: The state of Alabama dropped charges against four of the nine young black men accused of raping two white women in the “Scottsboro Case.”

1959: During a visit to Moscow, Vice President Richard Nixon engaged in his famous “Kitchen Debate” with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

1969: The Apollo 11 astronauts — two of whom had been the first men to set foot on the moon — splashed down safely in the Pacific.

1974: The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that President Richard Nixon had to turn over subpoenaed White House tape recordings to the Watergate special prosecutor.

1975: An Apollo spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific, completing a mission that included the first-ever docking with a Soyuz capsule from the Soviet Union.

1998: A gunman burst into the U.S. Capitol, killing two police officers before being shot and captured. (The shooter, Russell Eugene Weston Jr., is being held in a federal mental facility.)

2002: Nine coal miners became trapped in a flooded tunnel of the Quecreek Mine in western Pennsylvania; the story ended happily 77 hours later with the rescue of all nine.

2005: Lance Armstrong won his seventh consecutive Tour de France (he was later stripped of all his titles after admitting to doping).

2010: A stampede inside a tunnel crowded with techno music fans left 21 people dead and more than 500 injured at the famed Love Parade festival in western Germany.

2014: Air Algerie Flight 5017, an MD-83 carrying 116 people, crashed in northern Mali, killing all on board; it was the third major international aviation disaster in a week.